Pooky Amsterdam

Pooky Amsterdam is the CEO of PookyMedia, a real-time animation studio and virtual world entertainment company. The company is a recognized leader in using machinima to create highly cost-effective and targeted branding, sponsorship and advertising opportunities through its video services.

Ayelet Artzi

Ayelet Artzi is an organizational-vocational psychologist, HR and career consultant who specializes in the future of work and digitization. She is applying and researching VR applications and methodologies to the organizational psychology field and is enthusiastic about promoting diversity and inclusion of women both in the real and in the virtual world.

Jacquie Barnbrook

Jacquie Barnbrook is currently producing “The Martian VR Experience,” an immersive interactive narrative, for The Virtual Reality Company, where she also produced “The Bus to Canton” a VR documentary about Jerome Bettis and his rise to the Football Hall of Fame. Her first foray into VR was on Disney’s Jungle Book and she is currently developing several VR projects through her VR content company, jax VaRiety show. She has more that twenty years in film, visual effects and animation and has worked with Sony Pictures, Universal Studios and a number of top-tier producers and directors. She produced Sony Pictures Imageworks’ first in-house animated short film, “The ChubbChubbs!,” winner of the 2002 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. She wrote, produced and co-directed the award-winning live action short film “Wear Something Nice.”

Fee Berry

Fee Berry has been hooked by the creative possibilities of virtual spaces since entering a game development contest in Second Life in 2004. Since then, she has built games, commercial spaces for companies, medical simulations and has also composed music for virtual spaces.

Joyce Bettencourt

Joyce Bettencourt is the cofounder and president of the board of AvaCon Inc., a 501c3 metaverse users focused nonprofit and organizers of the Second Life Community Convention 2010, 2011 and OpenSImulator Community Conference 2013, 2014. She is also the community manager of TechSoup’s NonProfit Commons in Second Life, and the cofounder of The Vesuvius Group LLC, a development studio creating virtual immersive learning environments since 2006. She is a former Immersive designer and virtual events and community Organizer for educational nonprofit Global Kids, Inc. and a 2012 alumni of Singularity University’s Futurist Graduate Studies Program.

Pam Broviak

Pam Broviak manages GovGrid and the Public Works Group, and is a former city engineer and public works director. She is also a blogger, a past senior editor for Public Works magazine, a public speaker, and a civil engineer.

Cynthia Calongne

Cynthia Calongne is an adjunct professor at Colorado Technical University and a researcher and speaker with Lyr Lobo Research. She has hosted over 123 presentations and keynote addresses on virtual worlds, simulation and modeling, education, futuring and innovation, game design and research. She was also the grand prize winner in 2010 with Air University for the Federal Virtual World Challenge at Defense GameTech 2010. She is currently conducting research on the Military Open Simulator Enterprise Strategy project, sponsored by the US Army Simulation and Training Technology Center.

Jazmin Cano

Jazmin Cano is a 3D environment artist and game prototyper. She has a lot of experience with the Unity game engine setting up scenes, scripting simple environmental actos, and world building. She has worked on projects in PC gaming, mobile and tethered virtual reality games and experiences.

Shelia Chase

Shelia Chase teaches computer science, engineering and visualization courses for Mount Airy High School and is the director of the school’s Burroughs Wellcome STEM Grant. She is also the managing partner of SakritaSAM, an innovative company that designs and develops virtual reality, mobile and web apps, 3D animations and visual novels. She has a B.S. in Biology and a M.S. in Instructional Technology and certifications in data management and visualization, science education, math education, technology education, business and information technology education and scientific and technical visualization.

Sharon Collingwood

Sharon Collingwood is a lecturer, course designer, and project coordinator at The Ohio State University. In addition to literature and women’s studies, she focuses on instructional design and development in virtual worlds. She is also a consultant in immersive education design.

Chris Collins

Chris M. Collins is an IT Analyst at the University of Cincinnati. Her research focuses on the use of simulations, virtual worlds, social media, and augmented reality in higher education and for remote workforce collaboration. She founded and currently manages the Center for Simulations & Virtual Environments Research in the UC Office for Information Technology (UCIT), Research & Development department. In her free time, she serves on the board of AvaCon, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the growth, enhancement, and development of the metaverse, virtual worlds, augmented reality, and 3D immersive and virtual spaces. AvaCon’s primary goal is to connect and support the diverse communities and practitioners involved in co-creating and using virtual worlds, and to educate the public about the emerging ecosystem of technologies broadly known as the metaverse.

Nonny de la Pena

Nonny de la Peña, known as the “godmother of virtual reality,” is the founder and CEO of the Emblematic Group, the world’s leading creator of powerful virtual reality experiences. She is pushing technological boundaries for narrative endeavors, including creating virtual reality environments for news, documentary and entertainment. She has built multiple virtual reality constructs including a Formula 1 Singapore Grand Prix experience, Use of Force, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and Project Syria, a commission by the World Economic Forum and Hunger in Los Angeles, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2012. Her other projects include the MacArthur-funded Gone Gitmo, a virtual Guantanamo Bay Prison; Cap & Trade, an interactive exploration of the carbon markets; and Three Generations, a newsgame on the California eugenics movement. She is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker with twenty years of journalism experience including as a correspondent for Newsweek Magazine and as a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Premiere Magazine, and others. Her films have screened on national television and at theaters in more than fifty cities around the globe.

Margaret Derrington

Margaret de Jong-Derrington is a CTU Professor at Second Life. She is also a member of the King’s College London Virtual Worlds Special Interest Group and also of the DEPS Technology Enhanced Learning research group. Research interests include the use of virtual worlds and online social media for teaching and learning especially of languages, collaborative learning, project-based learning and problem solving in particular solving mathematical problems by programming.

Kristin Dragos

Kristin Dragos is the founder of Beazle Bee, a development studio focused on casual VR games. In 2016, Kristin enrolled in the Udacity VR Developer Nanodegree and has been hooked on VR ever since. She has a variety of Unity experience and has completed projects for Google Cardboard, Google Daydream, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive. She’s also done some augmented reality work with Google Tango. One of her projects, Future Fixup Past Patchup, won first place in Udacity’s VR Jam in February 2017. She also enjoys writing about VR on Medium.

Carla Inez Espost

From multimedia expanded cinema installations to virtual reality, from visual arts to film, Carla Espost is an avid scholar and filmmaker passionate about non-linear and specifically immersive cinematic narrative. She firmly believes that virtual reality will strengthen the power of good stories. Learn more at CIEproductions.

Lindsay Preston Friedman

Lindsay Preston Friedman is co-founder and CEO of FlipSnap. She is a successful entrepreneur with over a decade of experience in innovation in AR/VR and social media. Lindsay is also the founder and CEO of WritingRoom.com and an accomplished ghostwriter. With a background in big data, cloud computing, and network security, she has focused much of her writing career on technology and business based projects. She is also an award winning non-fiction author.

Renate Fruchter

Renate Fruchter is a stunning harnesser of virtual reality for over a decade in the architecture and construction industry. She is also the founding director of Stanford’s Project Based Learning Laboratory, a lecturer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and senior research engineer of collaboration technologies at the Center for Integrated Facilities Engineering.

Leonie Gaertner

Leonie Gaertner is the community manager at Avination, the second most trafficked commercial OpenSim grid. Her educational background is in IT and sociology, and she also studied cultural diversity and gender specific electronic communication in LGBT groups.

Megan Gaiser

As principal of Contagious Creativity, Megan Gaiser guides companies across industries to create meaning and money. She consults as a senior creative strategist, content advisor, director and storyteller for inspired computing experiences across films, games and VR/AR. She also coaches senior leaders to reframe normative approaches in favor of creative leadership to inspire cultures for transformative products. In addition, she serves as the diversity evangelist for several non-profits. She became the CEO at Her Interactive around the time publishers deemed girls “ungameworthy.” Using creative leadership, she and her team succeeded in identifying, developing and positioning an $8.5 million-dollar-game franchise that sold over 9 million units. Dubbed by the New York Times as the “UnBarbie” game maker, they ignored the naysayers and bucked the status quo to pioneer intelligent games designed for girls. For over a decade, Her Interactive enjoyed an inclusive culture resulting in inspired employees, customers, award-winning products and yearly revenue growth. Awards include Next Generation’s “Game Industry’s 100 Most Influential Women,” Gaming Angels’ “Top 10 Most Influential Women of the Decade” and the “2011 IndieCade Trailblazer Lifetime Achievement Award.”

Hannah Louise Gillis

Hannah Gillis is an entertainment producer with strengths in managing artistic and technical multi-disciplinary teams and integrating complex tasks, demonstrated in Industrial Light and Magic’s Experience Lab and Lucasfilm’s Advanced Development Group. Highlights include producing video teaser for ILMxLAB’s international launch and managing virtual reality and real-time cinema entertainment experiences. She has a passion for navigating uncertainty and empowering team members through iterative processes, especially in the emergent virtual reality industry.

Danya Glabau

Danya Glabau is core raculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research where she teaches classes on anthropology, technology, and feminist and social theory. She received her PhD in Science and Technology Studies and a B.A. in Biological Sciences from Cornell University. She is also co-founder of Practically In Person, a women-led virtual reality artists collective. With this project, she and her collaborators are seeking to intervene on who controls the production of content and whose voices and experiences are represented in this emerging technological space. Her scholarly research also includes a book in progress that examines food allergy patient activism in the United States.

Katie Goode

Katie Goode is the creative director of game studio Triangular Pixels, one of the key members of the UK virtual reality community, and, according to The Guardian, is at the forefront of virtual reality game design. She has been described as a virtuality reality pioneer who is pushing the technology forward to what it’s really capable of.

Robin Harper

Robin Harper established SimCity and Second Life as the most widely recognized brands in their categories. She is a frequent speaker on the value of social media in supporting business strategy and driving long-term customer relationships.

Chris Hart

Chris Hart is a developer with many years of experience creating a wide variety of software solutions. From rich web applications to mobile device software, currently focussing on developing educational games using the Unity3D game engine. She created the ReactionGrid Jibe platform for web-based 3D immersive environments using Unity3D. She has written chapters in several books on the Microsoft .NET Framework. MCTS, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Application Development. She is also an expert on OpenSimulator, a C# open source application for running a 3D virtual world platform, Second Life scripting, and in-world building and design.

Sarah Hill

Sarah Hill is a National Edward R. Murrow and 12 time Mid-America Emmy award-winning digital storyteller, Hangout host and virtual reality storyteller. Whether it’s 360 storytelling or hands-free live-streaming with Google Glass, virtual and augmented realities are two mediums in which she likes to create. Her company, StoryUP 360, captures reality in virtual reality. Currently, Hill is collaborating with the virtual reality industry on HonorEverywhere, an immersive experience for terminally ill and aging veterans not able to physically travel to see their memorials.

Bethan Horton

Bethan Horton oversees both external and internal communications as head of marketing public relations at The Mill’s Los Angeles studio. She drives new partnership opportunities and ensures maximum exposure for the talent and creative work through strategic marketing initiatives, public relations, social coverage, speaking opportunities, festival attendance and awards. She advances The Mill’s brand vision with over ten years of marketing and public relations experience, having worked for high-profile brands including Nickelodeon, Penguin Random House and Fifa World Cup. Her efforts in leading marketing campaigns have earned her two Webby Awards.

Judy Hu

Judy Hu is the director of business developments at HyperFair, Inc., a virtual meetings company with an immersive 3D environment for business events, conferences, and meetings. The company is currently working on full virtual reality support.

Adrienne Hunter

Adrienne has been working professionally in VR since 2014 and had led design on a number of VR startup products. She is currently the experience design director at Osso VR, using her interdisciplinary background in UX and game design to build a virtual surgical training platform. Before working at Osso VR, Adrienne founded Tomorrow Today Labs, a VR studio in Seattle where she co-created NewtonVR, a widely used open-source physics interaction framework for VR.

Linda Jacobson

Linda Jacobson is a science and technology marketer and communicator devoted to helping people understand and use complex new information so they may enhance their quality of life. She has been an executive producer developing custom immersive, real-time, 3D simulation applications in engineering and architecture at Glass House Studio and a virtual reality evangelist and senior manager for marketing at Silicon Graphics, Inc.

Katrin Janssen

Katrin Janssen is the founder of Jilroxy New Media, focused on providing consultancy and strategy services on virtual world technologies and social media. She previously headed up the Community Gateway Program at Linden Lab.

MeeRa Kim

MeeRa Kim is CEO and co-founder of Arbor Entertainment, a full service VR production company. She is a seasoned producer of new media content and feature films. She recently co-produced She’s Just a Shadow, a feature film starring Tao Okamoto, konwn for her work in Hannibal, The Man in the High Castle, Batman vs. Superman, and Wolverine. Kim also produced the breakout VR short “Vain: This Party Sucks,” which was an Official Selection at the Nashville Film Festival 2017 and International Vampire Film and Arts Festival 2017, and directed the VR music video Lights in the Forest for composer David Raiklen.

Maria Korolov

Maria Korolov is the president and founder of Women in Virtual Reality, and the editor and publisher of Hypergrid Business, an online publication covering enterprise uses of immersive virtual platforms since 2009. She has been covering technology for twenty years as a staff writer for Computerworld, a Source Media bureau chief in China, and, currently, as contributing writer for CSO.

Gunita Kuļikovska

Gunita Kulikovska is founder and CEO of Vividly, virtual reality software for professionals in the architecture and construction industry. Synergy between human beings, architecture and technology is what fascinates her and drives Vividly. She is a TEDx speaker and listed among Forbes 30 under 30 talents in 2016.

Stephanie Lackey

Stephanie Lackey is the founder and chief information officer at DUJO, LLC and an associate professor and director of the ACTIVE Lab at the University of Central Florida Institute for Simulation and Training.

Lisa Laxton

Virtual reality consultant Lisa Laxton has a proven award-winning history including being one of NASA’s STS-86 Space Flight Awareness Launch Honorees. She recently worked projects with a Navy team that raised the bar for future development using a variety of technologies for spatial analysis, 4D simulations, and scientific visualization.

Julie LeMoine

Julie LeMoine is the founder and CEO of 3D ICC, which offers the enterprise-grade Terf immersive virtual reality environment. She was also the founder and head of the Fidelity Center for Applied Collaboration, a four-time E2.0 speaker on Social Media. She helped start the entrepreneurship program at Simmons Post Grad, and has owned five companies.

Caroline Lewko

Caroline Lewko is the CEO of the strategic marketing and consulting agency WIP Factory, the first business to developer marketing agency. She has been in the mobile and tech sector since 1995 in a variety of roles including coder, funder, business developer and entrepreneur.

Heejeong Lim

Hannah Heejeong Lim is an expert in technology and strategy at Samsung Research America. She analyzes industry trends, competitive threats and market and technology disruptions, works on user interface development, and serves as the co-chair of the company’s Corporate Citizenship committee.

Stephanie Llamas

Stephanie Llamas is the director of research and insights and head of VR/AR strategy at SuperData Research. As director, she designs and oversees qualitative research across all digital gaming and playable media segments for the company. A digital industry veteran, she brings deep experience in digital media and academic research, where she focused on the sociopolitical history of video games. Stephanie is an advisor for the Casual Games Association and a regular speaker at industry events including Casual Connect, GDC and SxSW. She is a frequent thought leader, quoted in media ranging from Forbes to The Wall Street Journal and NPR.

Crista Lopes

Crista Lopes, a professor at UC Irvine, is a researcher with long experience in creative technical thinking. She is the co-founder of the field of aspect-oriented programming, main community builder and main responsible for pedagogical materials about it, for several years. Technical lead in projects in pervasive systems. Core developer of OpenSimulator, an open source virtual world platform, and inventor of the hypergrid protocol that allows different OpenSimulator worlds to connect to one another.

Marichka Lototska

Marichka Lototska is editor of Gamesauce and a content manager at Casual Connect, working with independent game developers invited to speak at the conference. She was previously a foreign affairs journalist with ICTV, based in the Ukraine. She has been a journalist since 2007, and has been covering technology since 2009.

Sara Martin-Mato

Sara Martin-Mato is a virtual reality researcher analyzing the opportunities and risks of VR from a neuroscientific perspective. She has founded the Women in Virtual Reality from Spain group with the aim of encouraging women from all profiles to enter this field to participate in its correct development.

Natacha Merritt

Natacha Merritt is CEO and creative director of Permission VR, an artist, a writer and a biologist. She was one of the creators of the Cirque du Soleil show Zumanity, and her work was also the basis for Cirque du Soleil’s OVO. She has spoken at conferences including Ars Electronica and the design conference AGideas.

Meg Miller

Meg Miller is a producer at Framestore VR Studio. She had worked on multiple award winning VR projects such as Game of Thrones: Ascend the Wall, Interstellar Virtual Reality Experience, and Trailscape VR.

Kate Mitchell

Kate Mitchell is the editorial manager at Lily Robotics, Inc. She previously headed up content strategy and developer engagement at Leap Motion, with a content pipeline designed to inspire early adopters and technical thinkers in the 3D motion control and virtual reality spaces.

Betty Mohler

Betty Mohler is a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. Her research interest is with using and improving virtual environments, investigating the differences between the virtual and real worlds, and investigating human perception in order to improve virtual environment software and hardware.

Jacquelyn Morie

Jacquelyn Morie has 25 years experience in developing innovative techniques for virtual reality environments. She spent 13 years as a Sr. Research Scientist at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), which she helped found in 1999. At ICT she created highly immersive virtual reality experiences and also novel virtual reality telehealth care activities. Prior to ICT, Dr. Morie worked at Disney Feature Animation and at special effects companies VIFX, Blue Sky and Rhythm & Hues. Her virtual reality work started in 1990 at UCF’s Institute for Simulation and Training in Orlando, FL.

Ermira Murati

Ermira Murati is the VP of Product at Leap Motion, a company that aims to remove the barriers between people and technology. Previously, she served as a product lead at Tesla Motors, where she oversaw the development and launch of Model X. She graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and is a builder of many things.

Nina Nussbaum-Jones

Nina Nussbaum-Jones is a virtual world evangelist and developer, from connecting the workforce to innovations in healthcare. She is the vice president of business development at 3D Immersive Collaboration Consultants, LLC and was previously a senior engineer at Lockheed Martin.

Jill Oana

Jill Oana is a management consultant. Startups and global brands such as Samsung Developer Connection, Applied Materials, Adobe, Verizon Wireless, Nokia rely on her creative approach to uncover innovative ways to grow business and keep people engaged through marketing, partnerships, and developer relations.

Gwen Pech

Gwen Pech has made a career in visualizing the earth sciences, in particular, 3D seismic and weather model data. She is currently working on automation of current road conditions and weather information acquisition for Vaisala, a Finnish company that develops, manufactures and markets products and services for environmental and industrial measurement.

LuAnn Phillips

LuAnn Phillips is a consultant in immersive learning and social media at eXtension. She is dedicated to creating interactive experiences that make learning fun and is an evangelist for the use of virtual worlds in education.

Winifred Phillips

Winifred Phillips is an award-winning game composer whose credits include five of the biggest and best franchises in gaming: Assassin’s Creed, God of War, Total War, LittleBigPlanet, and The Sims. She has composed music for multiple upcoming virtual reality video games, and as a VR game music expert, she writes frequently for Gamasutra on the future of music in virtual reality. She is the author of the bestselling book A Composer’s Guide to Game Music, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Her awards include an Interactive Achievement Award from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, three Hollywood Music in Media Awards, six Game Audio Network Guild Awards, five Global Music Awards, and three Gracie Awards from the Alliance of Women in Media.

Wendy Powell

Wendy Powell has degrees in both rehabilitation and computing, and a PhD in creative technologies. Her current research focuses on the ways in which virtual reality can be used to improve health and well being, and she is particularly interested in the way that VR systems and software can influence behavior, performance and perception. She is a senior member and technical expert at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and also a member of the International Society for Virtual Rehabilitation. She is passionate about translating academic research into practical applications to solve real-world problems.

Ekaterina Prasolova-Førland

Ekaterina Prasolova-Førland is an associate professor at the Department of Education and Lifelong Learning at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She has been working with educational virtual worlds since 2002, with several publications in the field. She has been involved in developing educational virtual reality simulations for a wide range of stakeholders, from aquaculture industry to the Norwegian Armed Forces. She is co-founder of VR Forum in Norway, the Women in VR/AR Norway group, and frequently gives public speeches and interviews on virtual and augmented reality for learning and training. She is currently working on a number of projects on educational applications of virtual and augmented reality in medicine, sports, therapy, tourism, emergency management and other areas.

Janet Rae-Dupree

Janet Rae-Dupree is a freelance innovation journalist. She has been on staff at U.S. News & World Report, BusinessWeek, the L.A. Times, the San Jose Mercury News and a number of smaller publications. She also has done award-winning work for CIO Insight, the Silicon Valley Business Journal and Contribute Magazine.

Heather Raikes

Heather Raikes is the founder and creative director of Neopoetics, a catalyst for innovation in immersive media and kinesthetic experience design. She is also creative director for augmented and virtual reality at 8ninths. For the past two decades, she has pioneered innovation in art and technology, probing, discovering and creating next-generation sensory experiences.

Nicole Relyea

Nicole Relyea is the community manager at Jaunt VR, which is on the cutting edge of virtual reality technology, building a full-stack of tools to enable creatives to produce cinematic virtual reality content. She also helped to found and served on the Board of Directors for the Mile High Young Professionals and helps aspiring founders find one another as the Silicon Valley Ambassador for CoFoundersLab.

Stephanie Riggs

Stephanie Riggs is the CEO and founder of Azimyth Creation Studios. A virtual reality and interactive storytelling veteran, she began working in immersive entertainment two decades ago with interactive virtual worlds exhibited at SIGGRAPH and E3, and has worked with Intel, Disney Creative Entertainment, Walt Disney Imagineering, Walt Disney Productions, HBO, Atlas Media, and Carmike Cinemas. She is a New York Times Critic’s Pick director for her documentary “The Standbys” and produced Blair Erickson’s award-winning 3D feature thriller “Banshee Chapter” with Zachary Quinto. Most recently she produced “Banshee Chapter: Oculus Rift Edition,” the first feature film ever released on the Oculus Rift. She became the first person to record a US president in virtual reality when President Obama invited her to film his historic speech in Nairobi, Kenya. Her groundbreaking virtual reality documentary “Kanju” will world premier at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.

Miriam Ross

Miriam Ross is a senior lecturer in the Film Programme at Victoria University of Wellington. She explores how new screen technologies operate through traditional academic frameworks as well as practice-based research. She is the author of 3D Cinema: Optical Illusions and Tactile Experiences and is working on new creative experiments with VR technology. Her website contains writing on VR as well as descriptions of her creative projects.

Kimberly Rufer-Bach

Kimberly Rufer-Bach founded and operates The Magicians, one of the oldest and most innovative content-development companies in Second Life. She has worked with NASA, the British Council, University of California Davis Medical center, and Wiley Publishing, Inc. She is the author of two books about creating and community building inside Second Life, published by Wiley.

Debby Shepard

Head of product for AltspaceVR, Inc., a virtual reality social platform and immersive meeting space. She was previously a senior product manager for Amazon Echo, and worked on telepresence and video communications products at Cisco and Skype.

Gwenette Sinclair

Gwenette Sinclair specializes in world development designs for immersive interaction and collaboration and personalized training and curriculum design for virtual worlds. She is also an expert in virtual mixed-reality conference, entertainment and fundraising event management, and one-on-one and customized curriculum group instruction in virtual world avatar and building skills.

Caroline Sinders

Caroline Sinders is a user researcher and artist. She holds a masters from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program where she focused on HCI, prototyping, and interactive storytelling, and a bachelor of fine arts from New York University’s Photography and Imaging Program, where she focused on digital culture and the future of imaging. Her work focuses on the intersections of experimental storytelling, design, machine learning, language, and data.

Helen Situ

Helen Situ is the virtual reality evangelist at NextVR, the leader in live virtual reality entertainment. She is driven by passion to connect the world through virtual reality shared experiences. She believes that virtual reality is the ultimate empathy machine, and virtual reality will completely change how we explore, experience, and share. She was hired as the fourth employee at NextVR and is a reoccurring judge with the annual innovation contest: Big Ideas at Berkeley. Follow Helen on Twitter and Medium @HelenSitu.

Louisa Spring

Louisa Spring heads up business development for Innerspace VR, an award-winning cinematic game company. Previously, she was the CEO of virtual reality production company Bipolar ID, the firm behind New York Times’ Mini Cooper narrative virtual reality films. She has also worked as a producer with international television companies and talent, including Far Moor, who produced The Fall on Netflix and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell for BBC America. Her talent management and production company has been around since 1999 and and has represented some of the UK’s most iconic and beloved actors, including John Rhys-Davies (Lord Of The Rings, Indiana Jones), Roger Moore (James Bond, The Saint), and Chris Judge (Stargate SG-1). She is passionate about telling stories in VR and pushing the boundaries of virtual reality by creating projects that use the most cutting edge technology to move the viewer emotionally.

Raqi Syed

Raqi Syed began her career in feature animation as an assistant technical director for Disney Feature Animation on films such as Meet the Robinsons and later as a lighting artist on Tangled. She then went on to work as a senior technical director with Weta Digital on films such as Avatar, The Planet of the Apes films, and The Hobbit Trilogy. A full list of her film credits can be found at IMDB. The Los Angeles Times pegged Raqi for its list of 100 industry professionals who can help fix Hollywood’s diversity problem. She is actively involved in the Wellington VR community. She is currently a Lecturer at Victoria University School of Design, in Media Design. A full list of her publications can be found here.

Tracey Taylor

Tracey Taylor is the executive producer and general manager at The Pulse, is a creative content studio working internationally from bases in Sydney and Hong Kong. Her depth of knowledge spans all areas of production from traditional film and television, to being at the forefront of media production for new technologies such as VR and AR, large screen events and interactive installations. Tracey has produced content for multiple VR projects, including Telstra’s award winning experience, “This is for the Fans,” as well as the acclaimed short VR pilot, Remember). She is also a strong and active advocate for education in the VR and digital media industry with an extensive and growing network of digital technicians, creatives and suppliers.

Melanie Thielker

Melanie Thielker runs an OpenSim hosting company and is the founder of the Avination grid, the second most popular commercial OpenSim world. She is also an OpenSim core developer and frequent code contributor, and a strong public speaker.

Mary Treat

Mary Treat is a product manager at AltspaceVR, a social platform for virtual reality. She is responsible for defining product direction, deliverable scheduling, user testing, and integration of design and development team cycles. Previously, she was a freelance user interface designer and researcher specializing in technology for challenging and high-stakes environments such as military, automotive, and healthcare.

Jessica Trinity

Jessica Trinity is CEO and Project Manager of the Phoenix Firestorm Project, Inc. Firestorm Viewer is developed by a team of approximately 80 people divided in support, development and QA departments and carries a userbase of around 350,000. Known in Virtual Worlds as Jessica Lyon, she has long been an advocate for protecting and improving the user experience for residents of Second Life.

Barbara Truman

Barbara Truman is a former faculty administrator and founding leader of the University of Central Florida’s distributed learning, [email protected] She researches collaboration in virtual environments and has founded a non-profit organization in Central Florida. Barbara seeks to combine virtual and physical communities across industry domains to increase medical simulation, netizenship, and science learning for philanthropy. She is also a strategic advisor for immersive learning and collaboration for the UCF Institute for Simulation & Training in the Mixed Emerging Technology Integration Lab.

Marlene Tuzar

Marlene Tuzar is a senior executive and leader who works with new and emerging technologies, including virtual reality. She provides private consulting to enterprises working in gaming and virtual reality environments. She is a frequent speaker on value messaging for building long-term customer relationships, business strategies and maximizing sales expansion. She is also a personal coach to many smart, talented, up and coming women in business.

Rachael Vaughn

Rachael Vaughn is a former mechanical engineer turned lawyer who loves supporting game-changing products in the virtual and augmented reality space. Currently she is a product counsel at Google in San Francisco supporting Google Cardboard. Prior to joining Google, she was an attorney at Microsoft where she supported HoloLens from both a patent and product counseling perspective.

Aimee Weber

Aimee Weber is a founding member of the Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds and the MOSES grid, member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, an erstwhile judge of the Federal Virtual Challenge, and the lead author of Creating Your World. She is credited with what has been referred to as the first use of machinima for educational purposes when she produced a virtual tour of our solar system which went on to be featured in a German film festival.

Jane Wilde

Jane Wilde is a learning designer. She provides training to faculty and business leaders on the effective use of Virtual Environments in instruction. In January 2015 she became the instructional designer for Online and Continuing Education at Linfield College in McMinnville Oregon, US. Prior to that she was on the education faculty at Marlboro College Graduate and Professional Studies where she taught courses in instructional design, gaming and simulations.

Suzanne Winterflood

Suzanne Winterflood heads the The CEW, a non-profit that creates virtual reality and online training applications. Over the past twenty years, she has worked extensively with entrepreneurs in small and medium-sized enterprises, providing development, career advancement and strategic assessment services. She is regularly invited to speak at a variety of events that have included CCWEST and Cybera Summit, and was a witness for the Standing Committee for the Status of Women Canada at the House of Commons, Ottawa in 2015.

Nichole Yankelovich

Nicole Yankelovich is founder and CEO of WonderBuilders, a software company that provides a platform for training, education, and collaboration in a 3D virtual environment. She is also a visiting scientist at the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives at MIT and executive director of the Open Wonderland Foundation. Previously, she worked at Sun Microsystems as the lead on Project Wonderland.

Ayşegül Yönet

Ayşegül Yönet is a JavaScript developer focusing on Angular, WebVR and Data Visualization. She is a developer expert at Google for Web Technologies and Angular and an active conference speaker. She is also a senior Angular engineer at Narwhal Technologies. She worked as senior software engineer at Autodesk Play, a 3D and VR authoring tool that is currently in beta. She enjoys teaching at a variety of non-profit organizations aiming to increase diversity in the software industry.

Karen Zastudil

Karen Zastudil is an expert in adult education and virtual learning, the creator of Sagaversity in Second Life, and a virtual training consultant. She is also the managing director of Women in Virtual Reality.

Gina Zdanowicz

Gina Zdanowicz is the founder of Serial Lab Studios, which provides audio production for VR and AR experiences, games, film, TV and other media. She is also an author and instructor of game audio for Berklee Online. Gina was nominated for a creative arts Daytime Emmy award in 2014 for her work with Nickelodeon.

Elizabeth Zharoff

Elizabeth Zharoff creates extraordinary music by singing opera around the world and writing music and sound for video games.

Welcome

Women in Virtual Reality is a networking and advocacy organization with a mission of increasing the visibility of women in virtual reality and attracting more women to the field. Click here to learn how to join.